Indigenous studies

Mention "American Indian," and the first image that comes to most people's minds is likely to be a figment of the American mass media: A war-bonneted chief. The Land O' Lakes maiden. Most American Indians in the twenty-first century live in urban areas, so why do the mass media still rely on Indian imagery stuck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How can more accurate views of contemporary Indian cultures replace such stereotypes? These and similar questions ground the essays collected in American Indians and the Mass Media, which explores Native experience and the mainstream media's impact on American Indian histories, cultures, and communities.

Chronicling milestones in the relationship between Indians and the media, some of the chapters employ a historical perspective, and others focus on contemporary practices and new technologies. All foreground American Indian perspectives missing in other books on mass communication. The historical studies examine treatment of Indians in America's first newspaper, published in seventeenth-century Boston, and in early Cherokee newspapers; Life magazine's depictions of Indians, including the famous photograph of Ira Hayes raising the flag at Iwo Jima; and the syndicated feature stories of Elmo Scott Watson. Among the chapters on more contemporary issues, one discusses campaigns to change offensive place-names and sports team mascots, and another looks at recent movies such as Smoke Signals and television programs that are gradually overturning the "movie Indian" stereotypes of the twentieth century.

Particularly valuable are the essays highlighting authentic tribal voices in current and future media. Mark Trahant chronicles the formation of the Native American Journalists Association, perhaps the most important early Indian advocacy organization, which he helped found. As the contributions on new media point out, American Indians with access to a computer can tell their own stories--instantly to millions of people--making social networking and other Internet tools effective means for combating stereotypes.

Including discussion questions for each essay and an extensive bibliography, American Indians and the Mass Media is a unique educational resource.

"Anarchists have much to learn from Indigenous struggles for decolonization. [A] thought-provoking collection" Lesley J. Wood, Professor, York University, Toronto

"Vigorously affirming anarchism's plurality, the authors make a powerful case for the reconfiguration of anticolonial struggle" Ruth Kinna, Professor, Loughborough University

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus became interested in Indigenous peoples, many of whom they saw as societies without a state or private property, living a form of communism. Thinkers such as David Graeber and John Holloway have continued this tradition of engagement with the practices of Indigenous societies, while Indigenous activists coined the term 'anarcho-indigenism', in reference to a long history of (often imperfect) collaboration between anarchists and Indigenous activists, over land rights and environmental issues, including recent high profile anti-pipeline campaigns.

Anarcho-Indigenism is a dialogue between anarchism and Indigenous politics. In interviews, the contributors reveal what Indigenous thought and traditions and anarchism have in common, without denying the scars left by colonialism. They ultimately offer a vision of the world that combines anti-colonialism, feminism, ecology, anti-capitalism and anti-statism.

Francis Dupuis-Déri is a Professor of Political Science and a member of the Institut de Recherches et d'études Féministes at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of several books such as Who's Afraid of the Black Blocs?. Benjamin Pillet is a translator and community organizer, with a PhD in Political Thought from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

We find our way forward by going back.

The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."

Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.

This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.